The diary of Anne Frank [antikvár]

FOREWORD bj Storm Jamson A MONG the presents Anne Frank received on her thirteenth l\ birthday, the one that pleased her most was a book with stiff covers in which she began to keep a journal: she had never tried to write before, but it came as naturally as song to a young bird. With a lively unself-conscious interest, she chattered about herself, her friends, the school examinations, the old mathemadcs teacher, the shy beginnings of a flirtation with Harry, who was sixteen and very pleasant. In these first light-hearted entries she is any well-brought-up, qtiick-witted child, and even though she speaks about them, it is a little hard to remember that the child is living in abnormal circumstances. But this is Amsterdam in June, 1942, and her parents are German Jews who emigrated from Germany in 1933. Anne wears a yellow star, cannot enter a tram, a cinema, ride a bicycle, sit in the garden after eight—a web of harassing restrictions. It does not press on her; she accepts it with a child's involuntary patience, and the vivacity which tried her teachers. She is attractive, and cannot help knowing it—and is pleased by it very much as by a fine day. Even in danger she is almost wholly a child: when, less than a month after her birthday, the always threatening stroke falls, and the family is forced to choose between obeying the Gestapo summons or going into hiding, the first thing Anne packs to take with her is her journal—then her hair-curlers and her school books. Her father had been preparing for months a place to hide—in the two upper back floors of an old building, the oflBice of his firm, now run by two Dutchmen whose courage and loyal friendship for the Franks made the attempt to escape possible. In some of these old Dutch houses the rooms at the back, looking on to a garden or a courtyard, can be shut off. Here Anne, her sixteen-year-old sister Margot, and her parents now took refuge, hunted animals burrowing out of sight; they were joined in a few days by